Tips & Tricks

If you’re using a 3D Touch-capable iPhone, with iOS 10 you can now choose from three different intensity levels for the LED flashlight by using a 3D Touch gesture on the Control Center button.

To do this, swipe from the bottom of the screen to bring up Control Center, and use a 3D Touch press on the flashlight button and you’ll get a menu with options for Bright, Medium, or Low light. You can access this menu to change the setting regardless of whether the flashlight is already on or not, and your iPhone will remember the last setting you used when you next toggle the flashlight on again.

Although the iPhone’s Clock app doesn’t often see many changes, Apple snuck an interesting new feature into iOS 10 that allows your iPhone to perform basic sleep tracking without any additional accessories. In the app, you’ll find a new Bedtime section that lets you set up bedtime reminders and wakeup alarms that work separately from the normal clock alarms.

If you’ve got a few years of photos available on your iPhone, the new Memories feature in the iOS 10 Photos app can be a great way to go back and relive significant events from past years. Photos will go back and automatically scan through your photo collection for groupings of photos by people and places and put them in collections, and Apple has even put the intelligence in place to figure out holidays — based on your home country — and organize your Memories accordingly by paying closer attention to photos around those times of year, and putting appropriate titles on them.

If you’re not seeing holiday memories and you think you should, check the setting for Holiday Events under Photos & Camera in the iOS Settings app. Also be sure that your regional setting, found under Settings, General, Language & Region is set to the correct country — which holidays are selected are based on this setting.

There’s a useful new accessibility enhancement in iOS 10 designed to help those who have trouble seeing small print — this new feature turns the iPhone camera into a virtual magnifying glass. Although you’ve been able to use the built-in zoom feature in the normal Camera app in a pinch (no pun intended), the new Magnifier feature not only provides quicker access — only a triple-click of the Home button is needed — but allows for a tighter zoom for even stronger magnification, as well as other controls to toggle the flash on for illumination, and to adjust brightness and contrast. You can even access inverted and color-shifted views, which is useful for those with color blindness and other vision challenges.

Apple has made some nice changes to the way that message threads are handled in the iOS 10 Mail app, replacing the prior message sub-list with an inline conversation view that users of alternative mail apps and platforms like Gmail will find far more familiar. In addition to presenting all of the messages in a single threaded view, in the Mail app now includes all of the messages in your entire mail account by default, rather than only those in the current mailbox or folder.

Of course, if you don’t like this fully threaded view there are still options to turn it off. The Mail section in the main iOS Settings app now includes a Threading section which, in addition to the global “Organize by Thread” option found in prior iOS versions, now also includes settings to sort threads in reverse chronological order, as well as turn off “Complete Threads” if you want to revert the pre-iOS 10 behavior of only showing messages from the current mailbox/folder in each thread. In the latter case you’ll still get the newer threaded view — there’s no way to go back to the old hierarchical message list design — but any messages that are not contained in the same mailbox/folder as the current message won’t be displayed.

With iOS 10, Apple has quietly added a small enhancement allowing you to designate individuals to bypass the Do Not Disturb setting for calls and/or texts on a per-contact basis. The option is somewhat hidden away in each contact screen under the Ringtone and Text Tone settings used to set custom tones and vibrations for calls and messages from each contact. When editing a contact, tap on Ringtone or Text Tone in the contact record; a new Emergency Bypass switch now appears at the very top of each vibration/tone selection screen, which can be toggled on to indicate that sounds and vibrations from calls or messages from that contact should come through even when Do Not Disturb is otherwise enabled.

Prior to iOS 10, your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch would try to automatically maintain a minimum amount of free space by removing unnecessary files from local storage under certain conditions. Included in this list of “unnecessary” files were things that Apple reasonably deemed could be re-obtained from the cloud — including items in your iCloud Music Library. Naturally, many users found this inconvenient, and Apple has obviously heard their cries — in iOS 10 you can now either turn this feature off entirely or choose to ensure that a minimum amount of music remains on your device.

You can find all of this under a new Optimize Storage setting in the Music section of the iOS Settings app. There, you’ll find a switch that can be used to toggle the feature on; when it’s enabled, a list of minimum capacity settings will also appear. The settings will allow you to set the minimum amount of music that will be kept on your device when space runs low. Selecting None here is the equivalent of the standard behavior from prior iOS versions.

While the new “Home” panel in the iOS 10 Control Center is a pretty handy feature for users with HomeKit accessories, it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s accessible by default even when your iPhone is locked. As with issuing Siri commands, HomeKit will still require authentication before controlling things like door locks, but if you want to ensure that other accessories like lights and thermostats can’t be controlled from the lock screen, you’ll be happy to know that you can disable Home control without having to deny lock screen access to the entire Control Center.

When iOS 10 debuted with its new Message Effects animations, one slightly obscure requirement that tripped up many users was the need to have the Reduce Motion setting turned OFF for background and bubble animations to play back. Many users were initially confused as to why animations on received messages weren’t playing, nor could animations be sent in outgoing messages. Even those who figured it out were left with the uncomfortable choice of turning all motion effects back on systemwide, or living without the cool new iMessage animation features.

Fortunately, Apple addressed this in iOS 10.1, with a new “Auto-play Message Effects” setting in the Reduce Motion section (under Settings, General, Accessibility). This option only appears when Reduce Motion is enabled, and allows you to choose whether or not Message Effects will play automatically on incoming messages. Even when this option is disabled, however, messages will come in with a button allowing you to choose to manually play the animation; effects will no longer be entirely suppressed as they were in iOS 10.

With iOS 10, iPhone users can now choose to have their devices verbally announce the name or number when an incoming call comes in — an especially handy feature for hands-free situations where you aren’t able to easily glance at your iPhone when it rings.

The new settings can be found in the Phone section in the Settings app, under Announce Calls, and you can choose whether to always have incoming calls announced, or only have your iPhone announce calls when you have headphones plugged in or are connected to a vehicle via Bluetooth.

There’s one other small but useful new feature in the iOS 10 Messages app that most people may have missed amidst of all the glitz and glamour of the shiny bubbles, stickers, and fireworks effects: you can now turn off Read Receipts for individual conversations. This is a huge boon if you like sharing read status with close friends and family but don’t necessarily want everybody to see when their messages to you have been read.

While you’re probably aware that Apple added lyrics support to Apple Music in iOS 10, what may be less obvious is that you can also view lyrics on your fourth-generation Apple TV, using tvOS 10. Once you’re playing a track, touch (not press) the Siri Remote touchpad from the Now Playing screen and you’ll get the same detail view as before, but if the song has lyrics associated with it, a second button appears at the top of the screen that can be used to bring up the lyrics for the current track.

Not every song in Apple’s Music catalog has lyrics yet. If you’re listening to a song that lacks listed lyrics, you can still add lyrics manually via iTunes on your Mac or PC if you wish. These should sync via iCloud Music Library and be available on your iOS devices and Apple TV.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget to switch off Live Photo mode on your iPhone 6s or iPhone 7, or maybe you have Live Photos that you’d rather just convert back to static, normal images. Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to do this with an existing Live Photo in your Photos app, by either non-destructively editing the original photo, or duplicating a photo in iOS 9.3 or later.

To remove the Live Photo effect from an existing photo, simply go into “Edit” mode and tap the Live Photo icon in the top-left corner of the screen to toggle it off. Like any other edit, this is non-destructive and will not permanently remove the Live Photo effect — it essentially just switches it off while leaving the actual underlying Live Photo data intact. Alternatively, duplicating a Live Photo using the option in the Share Sheet’s Actions menu will provide you with a choice to either duplicate the Live Photo in its original form, or create the copy as a “Still Photo” — in the latter case, the new photo will have all Live Photo data removed entirely, and will simply be stored as a straight JPG image. You can then delete the original Live Photo version entirely if you no longer want to keep it around.

One of the smaller features that Apple quietly snuck into iOS 9.3 is the ability to create a duplicate of any given photo or set of photos in the iOS Photos app. This can be done by selecting the photo(s) you want to duplicate, bringing up the iOS Share Sheet to see the sharing options, and looking for the “Duplicate” option in the lower actions row.

This creates an exact copy of the image, which can be useful if you want to apply edits while still keeping the original handy. As an added bonus, however, using the “Duplicate” option on a Live Photo will provide a choice between duplicating the Live Photo in its original form, or duplicating it as a still photo.

If you stream video from the iTunes Store or Apple Music and you’re on a limited data plan, you may appreciate two new quality settings that Apple has added for the built-in Videos app in iOS 10, allowing you to control how much data is used when streaming video, in exchange for quality.

Found in the Videos section of the iOS Settings app, two Playback Quality options allow you to independently choose between “Good” (basically SD quality) or “Best Available” (full HD quality) for both Wi-Fi and Cellular data connections. Users on limited data plans will almost certainly want to stick with the “Good” setting for Cellular, at least, although if you’ve got an older device and aren’t concerned about HD quality, you can get some performance gains from using “Good” for Wi-Fi connections as well.

In addition to a whole new design, the Maps app in iOS 10 also adds more control over route options for driving or transit directions. If you scroll down to the bottom of the list of available routes when getting directions in Maps, you’ll see a link for Driving Options or Transit Options, depending on which mode you’re in.

Tapping on Driving Options will bring up switches that allow you to avoid toll roads or highways along your route, while tapping Transit Options allows you to select which types of transit vehicles you would like to include in your route, with options available for Bus, Subway/LRT, Commuter Rail, and Ferry. These options can also be found in the Maps section of the iOS Settings app, under Driving & Navigation and Transit.

Along with the new Minnie Mouse Watch Face in watchOS 3, Apple has also snuck in the ability to have both Mickey and Minnie actually announce the time when you tap on them.

The feature is normally enabled by default for both of these Mickey and Minnie Watch Faces, but if you’re having trouble, swipe up to access Control Center and make sure your watch isn’t set to silent mode, and go into the watchOS Settings app, choose Sound & Haptics, and scroll down to ensure that Tap to Speak Time is enabled. If it’s the first time you’ve used the feature, you may also need to ensure that you’re connected to Wi-Fi (via your paired iPhone) and wait a few minutes for the necessary voice data to be downloaded over the Internet.

A useful feature in the iOS Health app that you may not be aware of is the ability to store your “Medical ID” for emergency purposes, including emergency contact information, medical conditions, allergies, medications, blood type, and more. This is all setup from the “Medical ID” tab in the Health app, and is designed to be accessed from the iPhone lock screen or Apple Watch in the event of an emergency. The Medical ID can be accessed from an iPhone Lock Screen by bringing up the passcode entry screen, tapping the “Emergency” button at the top, and then tapping the “Medical ID” icon that appears in the bottom left corner. Calls can even be placed to emergency contacts right from this screen with a single tap. If you don’t want your Medical ID available from the lock screen, you can just turn off the “Show When Locked” setting at the top of the Medical ID editing screen.

The new iMessage animations in iOS 10 are a lot of fun, but if you find that they’re not actually working, you’ll want to check your iOS Accessibility settings. After iOS 7 debuted its “parallax effect,” many iPhone users found it distracting or nauseating and decided to disable it by turning on Reduce Motion under Accessibility settings.

If you had this setting enabled before, it stays enabled after you update to iOS 10 — and as part of reducing motion, it also logically turns off any motion-related effects in the iOS 10 Messages app, such as animated bubbles and background animations. With Reduce Motion enabled, in fact, you not only won’t be able to receive or see these effects, but you can’t send iMessages using the effects either — pressing and holding on the Send button will have no effect at all, and Apple doesn’t make it particularly obvious that these features are dependent on the Reduce Motion setting.

Apple’s done some cool new things with the Messages app in iOS 10, including adding a live preview for taking photos right within a conversation. If you’ve used this feature, however, you may have noticed that the photo you capture doesn’t actually save to the iPhone’s Photo Library — it’s only inserted into the current conversation. While this can be desirable in some cases, if you’re taking a photo that you might want to keep around for later, you can actually bring up the full iPhone Camera by swiping from left to right and tapping on the Camera button that will appear.

This also has the advantage of giving you a full-screen camera view, which users of smaller-screened iPhones will certainly appreciate, compared to the much smaller live preview window.